A network management system (NMS) is a system used to monitor and administer a network of devices. A network of devices is collection of devices that are interconnected by a data network that allows for the sharing of resources and information. Each of these devices can be a physical or virtual device. In addition, each of these devices may have one or more different services running on that device, where the service is accessible over this network. Furthermore, each of the devices that are visible to the NMS is called a managed node.
The NMS manages these managed nodes of the network by receiving management data about the managed nodes and/or providing configuration settings or other administrative commands to the node. For example, the NMS can receive management data regarding the managed nodes such as faults, configuration, accounting, performance, and security information. What type of information each managed node collects, the type of information the NMS receives and how frequently the NMS receives this information depends on how each managed node is configured. For example, a network administrator may manually configure each of the managed nodes on the type of information collected, the type transmitted to the NMS, and frequency of the information transmission. The network administrator configures using a network management user interface that can send configuration commands to the managed node using a networking protocol (e.g., Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or command line interface (CLI)). This configuration is static because the managed node configuration does not change unless the system administrator manually changes the configuration.
One problem with a manual configuration is that by manually configuring the management data configuration, the type of information collected, transmitted, and frequency of transmission cannot automatically respond to events in the network.